As long as the milk is free, few Kansas school districts appear willing to buy the proverbial cow.

Only one school district -USD 480 in Liberal -has agreed to join the 14 districts that financed the lawsuit that led to $290 million in additional state school aid to local districts this year.

“We’re waiting to hear from several others. I don’t think Liberal will be the only one,” said John Heim, Emporia school superintendent and head of the loose-knit, lawsuit-backing group that calls itself Schools for Fair Funding.

“I have a hard time believing that Liberal will be more liberal than Lawrence,” he said.

Lawrence school board members have met with Schools for Fair Funding representatives in informal and executive sessions.

“We’re still in the discussion stage,” board member Craig Grant said.

“I don’t think there’s anyone on the board who thinks the cause isn’t right,” he said. “The problem is how to come up with the money in an already tight budget that we’re having to reduce due to lower-than-expected enrollment.”

Schools for Fair Funding has asked districts throughout the state to put up $6 per student. The Lawrence school district’s tab would be $60,000.

“I’d like to give them $20,000 or $30,000,” Grant said. “But at this point in the process, I don’t know that we can.”

Heim said the money is needed to cover the group’s attorneys’ fees and to hire lobbyists and consultants to counter those retained by groups opposed to increases in state aid.

The 2006 legislative session is expected to be especially contentious as lawmakers wrestle with how – or whether – to come up with the $568 million in additional spending expected by the Kansas Supreme Court in its remedy to a school financing formula it held unconstitutional.

“What happens in the next legislative session will set the tone for public education in the State of Kansas for the next 15 to 20 years,” said Alan Rupe, lead attorney for the plaintiff school districts.

Rupe warned that several legislators are looking at ways to undercut the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“There’s a disaster brewing here,” he said.

Districts that are content to “stand on the sidelines,” he said, will “only have themselves to blame” when they are forced to cut teachers or increase class sizes.

Alan Cobb, state director of Americans for Prosperity, an anti-tax group, scoffed at Rupe’s warning.

“Apparently, $290 million just isn’t enough,” Cobb said. “And the proliferation of taxpayer-funded lobbying is a big concern, too.”

Cobb said Americans for Prosperity intends to lobby against raising taxes next year.

“We won’t support or oppose an increase in school funding, but we’ll certainly oppose a tax increase of any kind,” he said. “State spending has increased 9 percent each year for the last two years. That cannot continue.”

Hays school superintendent Fred Kaufman offered a different view: “In order to do a good job educating kids, you have to have good teachers, you have to give your teachers enough time to teach, and you have to have small class sizes. All three of these things take money. It’s that simple.”

The lawsuit, Kaufman said, salvaged Hays’ schools.

“We were running up our class sizes, we were doing away with summer school, we were falling behind on our salaries,” he said. “We were really hurting.”

Without the lawsuit, Kaufman said, “we would have gotten nothing, in my opinion.”

In Liberal, assistant superintendent Lance Stout said the district joined Schools for Fair Funding in hopes of having a voice in the upcoming debate.

“We want to be heard,” he said. “A lot of times, out here in Western Kansas, we don’t think that happens.”